This episode is the fourth one in the “Police Academy Arc Wild Police CHASE” arc, which follows Zero (also known as Amuro and Bouron) during his days at the police academy. He has four friends at the academy, and each episode has focused on one of his friends. From the title of this episode, it’s clear the focus is on Hiromitsu Morofushi. Hiromitsu has had a running storyline in the previous three episodes of trying to locate the man who murdered his parents 15 years earlier. This episode finally culminates with everything coming into place.

At the beginning of the episode, we see Zero and his friends on bathroom cleaning duty because of all the trouble they’ve been causing at the academy. However, we get a flashback of when they were assigned cleaning duty, and Hiromitsu sees a bulletin about a missing young girl that grabs his attention. It turns out the girl looks a lot like someone he played with when he was a child when he lived in Nagano, but that his friend had died during their childhood. When Jinpei asks him to tell more about it, Hiromitsu tries to claim there’s nothing more. Jinpei snaps, and ends up admitting that even though Hiromitsu has been trying to hide the investigation into his parents’ murder from his friends, they already know about it.

This leads to Hiromitsu telling what he remembers, and he even has to admit that he has only more recently remembered a lot of it because he had suffered some amnesia about it. We also learn how he had lost his voice after the murder, but after moving to Tokyo and meeting Zero, he found his voice again. While a lot of the first half of the episode is Hiromitsu talking about what he remembers from the murder and the aftermath of being found by his older brother (who we know in the series as a police officer named Taka’aki Morofushi), it didn’t simply feel like a boring “info dump.” After he shares his story, it’s revealed that Zero had their three mutual friends interview the three men with tattoos that Hiromitsu had seen in the previous three episodes. At first, it seems like none of the men could be the culprit, but after Hiromitsu shares something his older brother said to him in a recent phone conversation about the case, the five of them piece together who the culprit has to be.

The revelation of who the murderer (as well as the kidnapper of the missing girl that sparked the cadets’ conversation in the first place) is, as well as the cadets trying to apprehend the culprit, were both tense and emotional. I’d been wanting to see how Hiromitsu’s investigation into his parents’ murder would be resolved, and overall, I was satisfied with how everything came together and brought his story to a close. About the only thing I felt was missing in this episode was a scene of Hiromitsu’s older brother reacting to the news that their parents’ murderer has been found and will be facing justice.

I think I may have mentioned this in one my previous writeups for this arc of episodes, but seeing these stories is a little bittersweet, since we already knew going into them that all of Zero’s friends are dead in the present time in the world of the Case Closed anime. However, it’s also been good to get some backstory for Zero and getting to see what kind of character he was before becoming the double agent that he is now. The short Detective Conan: Zero’s Tea Time anime that’s on Netflix is great for showing Zero’s day-to-day life in the present time in his various personas, but these episodes help to flesh out his past a little bit.

It’s a little sad knowing that this arc of episodes should be over now, since there has now been episodes focusing on each one of Zero’s friends from the police academy, and that seems to be the point of these episodes. Maybe at some point later in the main series, we can get occasional flashbacks from Zero about his days at the academy.

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